Take a trip with one of the bands that defined rock’s psychedelic era.

“The month that we spent in Chicago, 1966, I consider was a seminal period for us as musicians and as a band,” drummer Dave Getz said.

“It was just a strange thing. We also didn’t get paid for that. We’ll talk about it at the Arcada Theatre, if people want to know and we’ll go back. We’ll take a trip down memory lane and we’ll go back to Mother Blues on North Wells Street. 1966.”

Big Brother & the Holding Company, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Janis Joplin, will perform at 5 p.m. Sept. 25 at the Arcada Theatre in St. Charles. The band will perform all of its hits made with Joplin, along with songs from its later albums.

The band members will also answer questions and share stories, including about the time they spent in the Windy City 55 years ago at the now defunct Mother Blues club in Old Town.

“At that time, you could get beat up in Chicago for walking around with long hair,” Getz said. “We almost did, several times. Now of course you have bikers and doctors and people with MAGA hats with hair longer than we had then.”

From mid-August to mid-September 1966, the band played at the legendary blues club.

“We were booked for a month. The first two weeks we got paid. And then all of a sudden at the end of the second week, the owner, who wasn’t getting as many people as he thought he would like to get said he might not be able to pay us but if we’d like to stay there and play anyway he’d pay us what he could,” Getz said.

“We had no choice, really. We had no way to get back. We played for another two weeks and at the end of the two weeks he said, ‘well, guys, I can’t pay you anything.’ ”

While it was during that time in Chicago that the band began recording its first album, it’s the band’s second album, 1968’s “Cheap Thrills” — the last album with Joplin before she went solo — that had the band topping the charts. The album, which contains hits such as “Summertime,” “Piece of My Heart” and “Ball and Chain,” is often listed among the best rock albums of all time.

In 2018, a collection of outtakes from the record was rereleased with the title the band originally wanted, but the studio wouldn’t allow.

“A couple years ago, Sony finally released a lot of the outtakes from ‘Cheap Thrills’ and we were able to title the album ‘Sex, Dope and Cheap Thrills,’ which was the original title,” Getz said.

It’s the bands time with Joplin that also garners the most questions from fans, Getz said.

“Most of the questions I would say are about Janis and what it was like to work with Janis and what she was like. They’re hard questions to answer because she was such a complex person that you can’t give a very short answer to questions like that,” he said.

“But she’s iconic and she’s a legend and of course that’s part of what we do. We do the material that we did with her. So those questions about Janis come up.”

Asked if he would’ve imagined then he’d still be performing and touring 50 years later, he said “Not with Big Brother.

“I actually didn’t think it was impossible that I would still be playing music because I came a little bit out of a jazz background and in jazz you have musicians playing well into their 90s and 80s and things like that. And the same thing with classical music,” Getz said. “But in the ’50s and ’60s, rock ‘n’ roll was pretty much youth music. It started out mostly for teenagers.”

Much of the band was in their early 20s. Getz was 26 at the time.

“None of us really imagined that as a reality we’d still be doing this music, particularly rock ’n’ roll, in our old age,” he laughs.

Now, they’re ready to get back on the road after the pandemic shuttered live performance venues for a year and a half. There’s a lot of excitement, but also a lot of questions.

“People are dealing with airline travel and having to wear masks and wondering which indoor shows will happen and which indoor shows will be canceled. Each state is different. Some states have more people vaccinated and less people going to the hospital and then some states … if we had shows in Florida right now we probably wouldn’t do it because it’s a little too risky to be playing indoors. Outdoors is a different thing,” Getz said.

“It’s just a question that’s in the air right now with a lot of bands and a lot of acts and a lot of entertainers going out. It’s a little weird and it’s a little scary, but it’s also exciting. We want to do it. We want get out there and start playing music again. That’s what we do. We live for it.”

Kathy Cichon is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.